I have been playing with GIMP over the weekend. I had heard horror stories about its user interface that had put me off from installing it. Thankfully I gathered some courage and finally got around doing it this weekend.

I was pleasantly surprised with it. Spent about 3 hours playing with a scanned pencil and ink draw that I had done.  It took me some time to get my head around the menu, mainly trying to find what I was looking for… but I got there at the end.  I was really impressed with how much you could actually do with it.

Here is the guinea pig (click on the image to enlarge).

So, once I mastered that – I closed the computer! later that weekend I got drawing a new duck. I decided from the outset to add some light effects, that plus the colour enhancements took me under 30 min (including setting up my crappy scanner)… which I though it was pretty good.

This time I was struggling to insert a spot light. The advantage of GIMP (as many open source projects) is the community that has been build around it. After running some searches in Google,  I found several blogs and howto materials that guided me through what I wanted to achieve. Again here is the result:

All and all, I highly recommend GIMP. You can not beat the value for money! yes, it is  a bit quirky but that is part of the fun …